Migrating to PostgreSQL in Academia

Moving legacy data and applications to PostgreSQL for a large University

Large academic institutions often have data collected in many different database systems that has to be collected for administrative use. This lecture will be a discussion of issues raised and techniques learned while migrating the academic advising system for the Franklin College Office of Academic Advising (responsible for advising undergraduates at the largest college of The University of Georgia) from a home-grown FileMaker Pro-based system to an award-winning web application built with PHP and PostgreSQL.

The presentation should cover the following topics:

- The advantages of using PostgreSQL in the academic environment, including cost, performance, and features
- The experience of replacing legacy proprietary applications with PHP/PostgreSQL-based solutions, including importing data from data sources with widely varying levels of data integrity
- Security and legal concerns specific to academia, including various US laws relating to the handling of student information
- Data management policies